Call for Papers: 2010 Interstices Under Construction Symposium
Unsettled Containers:[i] Aspects of Interiority

University of Auckland, 8-10 October 2010

Keynote speaker (to be confirmed): Prof David Leatherbarrow
(University of Pennsylvania School of Design)


In architecture, as in ecology, equilibrium between inside and outside
is rather like paradise, something too good to be true, therefore not
good enough.                                                  David
Leatherbarrow


Is architecture a cult of the externalised object? It would seem so: of
46 images of prize winning entries on the 2009 World Architecture
Festival website, for example, only four show interiors.[ii] This
object-cult and neglect of the interior is a symptom of architecture's
domination by a polarised nineteenth-century conception of containment.
So efficiently are interior and exterior sealed off from each other that
they are frequently treated as discrete professional domains.

However, inside and outside are always ready to be reversed - their
boundaries full of tension and at points occupied by beings who awaken
"two-way dreams" (Bachelard). In Benjamin's Arcades Project, 19th
century petit bourgeois encased themselves in their interior as in a
"spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like
so many insect bodies sucked dry". In his dissection of their culture,
where the private sphere of the dwelling and public spheres of work and
politics are opposites, the interior appears as a counterpart to the
global consciousness of empire. European traders and travellers
retreated after their worldly adventures into their wallpapered
interiors, to "save their souls" (Sloterdijk). However, the sealed world
of the 1851 Crystal Palace turned the exterior world into a magic form
of immanence - by asserting the values of imperialist capitalism in a
spectacular domestication of the globe. Conversely, the Parisian arcades
appear as the workers' living rooms.

To many, today's spaces seem more involuted, fragile and unsettled than
those of the past. Phenomenological theories of architecture, like those
of Pallaasma, Pérez-Gómez, and Leatherbarrow, represent an intense focus
on the proximate qualities of architecture, and a possible avenue for a
new emphasis on the interior. Other approaches highlight different modes
of every-day proximity, such as digital, intimate involvements.
Sloterdijk posits the ability to say "we" as the fundamental condition
of space, which creates interior spaces as spheres for dwelling. Like
immersive plants, these elaborate human existence and embed human
relationships - even if this interiority is, from the beginning, touched
by an exteriority against which it must assert itself. Opposite forces
create the climatised hothouses of luxury consumption, relaxation and
privileged cosmopolitanism familiar to us today, in which nature and
culture are indoor affairs and history is left outside. Those with
purchasing power stage their daydreams on the inside as, on the outside,
more or less forgotten majorities try to survive amongst traditions,
adaptations, revolutions and improvisations.

How can interiority be conjugated in new ways? If interiority is a way
of thinking of ourselves as being-in-the-world, to the exclusion of
whatever we fail to integrate, how do we draw the lines and name the
territories today? What constitutes interiority? What does it have to
say about the institutionalised containment of refugee centres or gated
communities; the improvised urbanism of Freetown's shanties or Brazilian
favela; or, indeed, the openness of the Pacific? How are transpositions
of space from sacred to common, public to private, mind to body affected
by interiority? What is it like to negotiate the pae [iii] from inside?
Where are the spaces of Self and Other? How do global and regional flows
circulate in interiors, and how do we register difference? How are
interior immensity and claustrophobia related, and is there a special
relationship between interiority and possession? When is a set of walls
an interior, when is an object a container, and when is a container a
world?

Interstices invites you to unsettle the dichotomy of interior and
exterior; to redefine and reorient the concept of the interior for the
present, and project it towards the future. We welcome postgraduate
students, academics and practitioners to present their investigations in
20 minute papers. Please send a 500 word abstract of your presentation
to Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul ([log in to unmask]) by 5 July 2009.
Abstracts will be double-blind refereed and, if accepted, published on
the Interstices website (www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz
<http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/> ).


The symposium will be held on 8-10 October 2010 at the School of
Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, 22 Symonds St,
Auckland. Students, academics and practitioners will present their
investigations in 20 minute sessions. Abstracts will be double-blind
refereed and those accepted made available on the Interstices website
(www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz
<http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/> ). There will be a workshop
session for emerging researchers, independent of the refereeing process,
which will focus on developing research capability. In November, the
symposium will be followed by a Call for Papers, with the same theme,
for issue 12 of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts in
2011.[iv]




________________________________

________________________________
 [1] 'Unsettled containers' (unruhige Behälter) is a term which the
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk probably derived from Gaston
Bachelard, who conceived of humans as fundamentally unsettled and
half-open beings.

[ii]
http://www.worldarchitecturefestival.com/winners.cfm?eventYear=2009 

[iii] Pae (Maori): a transitional zone of demarcation and negotiation
(R. Jahnke, 1999).

[iv] Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received
an "A" rating in the 2009 and 2010 Australian Research Council's Journal
Ranking Exercise.



Dr Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul
Assoc. Professor Spatial Design

http://arden.aut.ac.nz/moodle/mod/data/view.php?d=15&rid=733 

Editor of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts:
http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/
<http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/>

School of Art & Design
AUT University

Private Bag 92006

Auckland 1142

64 (9) 921 9999 extn 8240

WW-Building, Room 505


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